The Real Enemy in College Athletics

The climate of college athletics has changed significantly in the past couple of decades, and with it, the college recruiting process. As sports have become a more profitable venture for universities, rules have been bent and then broken as schools vie for the next LeBron James or Tom Brady. Often the kids themselves are scapegoated as the root cause of the infractions, which are committed by the schools, but how much resistance can we really expect high school seniors to give when 6-figures are being thrown in their faces, just to attend one college or another?

The arms race has turned sour, as some prospective student athletes have come to expect impermissible benefits in exchange for their commitment. When looking deeper into why schools care so much about their athletics, specifically the “revenue” sports in football and basketball, the answer is pretty clear. Members of the six major conferences all averaged profits exceeding 1 million dollars on a per-game average (CNN Money).

When that many zeros are on the table, colleges see each recruit as a chunk of that income. However, this does not justify the incidents that seemingly occur more and more frequently, both during the recruiting process, and after the student athletes are on campus. I argue that rather than continuing to place blame on the schools, the NCAA needs to look at what changes it can make itself to clarify grey areas that currently exist in its bylaws; it should also review current policies to ensure that they are both fair and reasonable.

Thus far in NCAA Recruitment, there has been a consistent cycle of violations occurring, followed by the guilty being reprimanded, without anyone stopping to think about whether the punished are really the only ones out of line. Some observers believe that students should just not accept early scholarship offers that are shown to them but, as it is put in Cheaters Not Criminals, “From the student-athlete’s perspective there is much to gain from a school’s offer. If a child has grown up dreaming of playing [at their dream school], why not accept the dream when a coach offers it” (Bascuas 585). Bascuas proceeds to discuss the inherent risks of committing to a school so early in life, which are another strong reason that the NCAA should protect the student athletes.

Alfred Yen’s article about early scholarship offers to student athletes provides both facts and analysis regarding the constant lowering of the age at which kids begin to receive offers to play in college. Yen does not attempt to pick a side in this argument, but states that the NCAA must intervene so that elementary schools students are not targeted by universities a few years from now.

He also states how difficult it is for the NCAA to oversee the recruiting as it is happening, since schools do not have to go through the organization itself while courting athletes early on. In their article “Does the NCAA Exploit Student Athletes?” Richard B. McKenzie and E. Thomas Sullivan explore the idea that the NCAA does not provide enough for its student athletes, and thus essentially uses them as cash cows.

The article goes on to highlight situations in which the players were punished for receiving impermissible benefits, while arguing that the student athletes deserve consistent rewards such as a stipend. McKenzie and Sullivan share my opinion that the NCAA does not offer enough to the student athletes in return for their services, and this is one of the few academic articles that demonstrates this opinion.

My research complements these other pieces by explaining not only what the NCAA does wrong, as other articles mention, but also offers suggestions on how to amend the current rules in place. This is important because while the flaws of the system may be clear, it is difficult to take the next step and discover what can be changed to add transparency and bring about less violations overall.

This research is obviously relevant as UNC has found itself in the middle of infractions as of late, but ours is not the only school to feel the wrath of the NCAA. According to a 2011 USA Today study, “53 of the 120 universities in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Bowl Subdivision, were found by the Division I Committee on Infractions to have committed major rules violations from 2001 to 2010. That number appears to have held largely constant from the previous two decades, but the 2000s show that the number of colleges that committed serious violations of the association’s academic rules nearly doubled, to 15 from eight in the 1990s.” As a point of reference, compare “serious violations” to prison. One of every 142 Americans is currently incarcerated (US Government Info); this does not seem too overwhelming of a percentage.

Now imagine that fraction increasing to one in every eight, this would probably cause a stir and everyone would be up in arms about the strictness of the United States penal system. When 15 of 120 schools (1/8 as I mentioned) are accused of major violations, the problem is less with the universities and more with the governing body. Statistics like these are what back my argument that the NCAA needs to be reformed.

To understand why the NCAA acts as it does, one must understand that its decisions are founded in the money that is at stake in college athletics.

Editors Note: Check out Part II of Ben’s compelling column tomorrow at 10am on Keeping It Heel